Painful Memories
by Luvscookie
Summary: On a dare from her best friends, Lucy goes inside the town's haunted house, where Jose Porla killed his wife and then hung himself in the basement. But while in the house, Lucy is confronted by a ghost from her past. Now, Lucy must not only escape the evil lurking inside the house, but from the demons of her own past.


**Hey Guys, I'm back here with a one shot, I just needed to tell you that I'm still here, it's just SCHOOL. (And a little bit of Fairy Tail) So instead of updating on my 3****rd**** chapter of My Perfect Fairy Tail, here's a one shot you can enjoy so…. Since this is mainly about Lucy, how about you do the disclaimer.**

**Lucy: Ok. Luvscookie does NOT OWN Fairy Tail, and never will.**

**Me: yea, yea I know…. Ok let's start this**

* * *

**Luvscookie Presents:**

**Painful Memories**

As soon as Lucy walked into the Porla house, she realized she'd messed up.

Every kid in town knew the house was haunted. Hell, even some of the adults would fess up and admit it. Thirty years ago, Jose Porla sliced his wife's throat in the living room and then hung himself from the rafters in the basement. No one knew why he did it. But everyone swore the basement floor was stained crimson from the blood from dripping down between the floorboards.

Since then, no one had ever lived in the house longer than a couple months. Their brief residency wasn't due to the faulty wiring or the poor insulation or the drafty windows or even the old plumbing.

No, everyone had moved out because creepy stuff just happened in the Porla house.

But Lucy didn't let that bother her. Levy and Erza, her best friends, had dared her to go inside. There was no way she could let them think she was a chicken, especially when they'd claimed to not only have gone inside the house but down into the basement as well – the most haunted part of the Porla home.

Lucy seriously doubted her friends had stepped inside the Porla house's infamous walls, and she doubted even more anything was going to happen to her.

But as soon as she opened the door and stepped inside, she knew she'd messed up

The door knob was ripped out of her white-knuckled grip, banging shut behind her as she was forcibly dragged into the house. She screamed for Erza and Levy to help her, but her cries were swalled by the walls of the monstrous house. She tried to open the door but it wouldn't budge. She grabbed onto the door knob harder and frantically twisted it back and forth. But the house was still sealed like a tomb. She gave up and cautiously backed away from the door.

Lucy turned around. Her eyes darted around the room, expecting some ghost or ghoul to drag her down into the hellish darkness of the house. She was just as petrified as she'd been when she was three years old. She would stare wide-eyed at her closet in horror, afraid some monster would jump out any moment and pull her into the abyss hidden inside her closet.

She'd forgotten how that childhood fear and felt.

But now, she was drowning in it.

She jumped when she heard a creaking sound to her left, her heart trip-hammering inside her chest. She spun and discovered a mouse skittering across the floor. She was terrified of mice, but it seemed less scary than the horrors which plagued her mind right now. Giggling nervously, she felt ridiculous for being so jumpy. She took a few deep breathes and tried to calm down before deciding to prove herself that she didn't have anything to be afraid of inside this house.

Lucy crept forward, noticing how the front room was empty. According to the story she'd heard, the last residents had fled the house in the middle of the night. But evidently, they hadn't been so frightened as to leave their belongings behind in their haste to escape.

Maybe the Porla house wasn't as sinister as everyone claimed.

Every town across Fiore had at least one haunted house. They'd become a staple of society as common as the corner market or side of the road gas station. But that didn't necessarily mean all haunted houses were really haunted.

Lucy was comforted by this thought as she passed from the front room into the adjoining room.

Despite the dire situation of being trapped inside the house, she tried to justify the situation. She had no problem conjecturing how the dilapidated door had lodged into the door frame after a violent gust of wind had yanked it out of her hand. She also convinced herself that the same wind had blown her into the house with its sheer force.

But her fear impeded her room recognizing the irrational logic she was using to conjure up a wind that had simultaneously blowing into and out of the house in order to bring about her horror movie entrance into the Porla house.

Lucy glanced to her left and saw an open door with a flight of decending stairs.

The basement.

Her first instinct was to just get the hell out of the house. Staring at the doorway, her mind by-passed its previous logical and rational line of thinking and clamped onto the primordial and instinctive emotion of fear instead. She had no idea what was waiting for her down there. She'd never seen a but that didn't mean they didn't exist. And if a ghost was down there, she was willing to bet it wasn't any Casper the friendly ghost.

But she found courage in the fact that she'd never heard of anyone dying inside the house, other than the Porlas. Yes, it was supposedly haunted. And yes, people swore they'd seen ghosts. But those ghosts had never killed or even harmed anyone.

Lucy steeled her nerves and prepared to go down into the basement.

As she timidly walked down the flight of stairs, she started counting each step. It was a peculiar habit she'd had ever since she could remember, and half the time she didn't even realize she was doing it. Her descent seemed like an eternity as the air grew darker and heavier. Even though she knew they were coming, she jumped every time the steps creaked underneath her feet. Not sure if she could take it anymore, she considered once again getting out of the house.

Refusing to turn back, she continued down the stairs, hoping the worst case scenario would involve her falling and breaking her arm. With every tentative step, she kept counting and praying she hadn't made a mistake by deciding to go down into the basement.

To her dismay, she reached the bottom of the stairs when she'd counted twenty-nine steps. Confused, she turned back around and looked at the stairs. The normal-looking flight of stairs couldn't contain more than fifteen steps, but she'd clearly counted twenty-nine steps. She recounted the steps and discovered there were indeed only twelve steps.

Lucy immediately felt like she was going to "choke" (A phrase she'd used for throwing up when she was a little girl) as a terrifying and creepy sensation crept up her already frightened body.

Her mother had been twenty-nine when she had died.

An unwanted scene flashed through Lucy's mind as she stood frozen at the bottom of the stairs, an event which she'd fought to suppress over the course of the past year

_She was standing at the top of the staircase in their old house. Her mother was in front of her, screaming at her about how things were going to change. She was yelling back, reinterring how she was sixteen now and wasn't a little kid anymore. They continued arguing their faces inches apart as they spat out stinging words that neither one of them meant. She was growing tired of listening to her mother treat her like a baby. She turned around to storm off to her room, but her mother grabbed her by her arm and told her that she wasn't done talking to her. Then, her mother shook her arm, informing her that she wasn't going to disrespect her like she'd been doing recently. Over-brimming with anger, she forcefully yanked her arm out of her mother's grip and started to stomp up the stairs to her room. But she stopped when she heard a scream followed by a loud thump. She jerked around to see her mother already half-way down the stairs and falling fast. When she hit the floor head first, the blood pouring out of her head turned her mother's blonde hair into a sickening crimson color. Lucy remained frozen in shock at the top of the stairs, unable to help her motionless mother. When she finally realized her mother was dead, she tried to scream for help. But the cry remained locked in her throat, refusing to comply, and all that escaped her lips was the silent air forcefully expelled from her lungs._

Lucy felt a cold chill crawl up her spine as her mother's death come back to haunt her. For the past year, she'd been able to keep those horrifying images locked away, refusing to let herself relieve that horrible accident.

She immediately blamed this cursed house for dredging up that fatal night.

Lucy stood at the bottom of the staircase, surrounded by darkness, trying to decide what she should do. The flashbacks of her mother's death had frightened her more than if she'd seen Jose Porla 's discolored and bloated body hanging from the rafters.

She decided to go back upstairs and find a way out of the house. She's more than proved to her best friends, as well as herself, that she wasn't afraid to go into the basement of the Porla house. But she'd done it at the price of resurrecting the repressed memories of her mother's tragic death.

'_Time to get the hell out of here,'_ she thought as she started walking back up the stairs.

When she heard the scream of her mother, Lucy thought for a second time how she'd messed up by coming into this house.

She forced herself to look at the top of the stairs. An expression of disbelief mixed with terror swept across her face when she saw the thing which had once been her mother standing in her doorway.

Her mother's skin which had always been smooth and white as porcelain, was now a n ugly mosaic of decayed black, brown, and gray flesh, peeling away some areas while it had been rotted off completely in others. Her once warm and pristine smile was now a fiendish snarl full of rotting teeth. She held her long and blackened fingernails in front of her like claws, ready to rip into something like a wild animal. Lucy could even see dried splotches of blood in her mother's filthy, matted hair.

"Mom?"

As soon as the word was out of her mouth, Lucy regretted having said it. There was no way possible this thing could be her mother.

But when it spoke to her, Lucy heard the voice of her mother as clearly as she'd heard it all of her life up until that tragic day last year.

"Lucy honey, Mommy doesn't want to fight with you anymore."

There was a sweet and pleading tone to her mother's voice. It made Lucy's skin feel cold and clammy like slugs were crawling all over her flesh.

Her mother stepped down the stairs, flexing her claw-like hands and licking her rotted lips with her black swollen tongue.

Lucy ached to run away, even if it meant dashing headlong into the unknown darkness of the basement. But she couldn't move. She was frozen with horror just as she'd been when her mother had accidentally fallen down the stairs. She begged her legs and feet to move, but they spurned her pleas, remaining locked in place as if trapped in a block of cement.

"Why do you want to run away from me Lucy?"

Lucy could now detect a hint of hatred laced with mockery in her mother's voice.

"Mommy just wants you to know I'm not mad at you anymore, baby. Even if it was your fault I fell down those stairs and cracked my head wide open, Mommy's going to make it all better."

Her mother stopped about halfway down the stairs, licking her lips as phlegm saliva mixed with blood seeped out of her mouth. Lucy could see the bestial ferocity building up in her mother's bloodshot eyes, reminding her of a rabid dog she'd seen before.

"Do you know how Mommy is going to make it all better, you little bitch?" her mother hissed at her." I'm going to rip your disrespectful body to shreds and then feed on your flesh!"

Her mother let out an eerie, earsplitting shriek as she leapt forward. Lucy screamed as her body was paralyzed with terror, unable to break free from the grave her body would soon become.

With her mother inches away from ripping into her, Lucy's face was splattered with bloody saliva as the stench of her mother's rotting body violated her nostrils. She squeezed her eyes shut, once again reminded of how she used to shut her eyes when she'd been a little girl lying in bed, afraid to look out into the darkness because of the monster waiting to reach out and grab her.

And now that monster was her mother.

Quivering, she waited helplessly for her mother to begin tearing into her flesh.

But the monster didn't rip into her.

The seconds crawling by seemed like days. Lucy was too terrified to open her eyes to make sure her mother, or the thing she'd thought was her mother, was gone.

After a couple of minutes, she finally opened her eyes, her body still shaking uncontrollably. He eyes darted around in the darkness, searching for any sign of her mother.

But she wasn't there.

Before her brain even had time to consider the idea of escape, her legs and feet moved to their own accord and she was running up the stairs, too terrified to look back.

She reached the top of the stairs, spun around, and slammed the door shut. The sound echoed throughout the mausoleum-like house. She leaned against the door, her breathing rapidity increasing, her lungs screaming out for ear. Within seconds, she was hyperventilating and felt like she was going to lose consciousness.

Lucy dropped down to her knees, placing her hands on the door in front of her for support, As her body fought to ward off the attacking panic and stress, she started crying as her mind confronted its own assailant: the guilt over her mother's death.

She tried not to blame herself but it was useless. She knew that, even if it had been an accident, she had indeed caused her mother's death.

As she knelt on the floor in the Porla house weeping hysterically, acceptance steadily replaced the guilt until she finally realized she needed to deal with it rather than hide from it like she'd been doing the past year. If she didn't move past the guilt, then it would devour her just as the horrific apparition of her mother had threatened to do moments ago.

Lucy wiped the tears away from her face as the hyperventilating subsided.

She wondered how long she'd been trapped inside this house of hell confronting her own demons. She didn't know if the house was haunted or not, but she knew without a doubt that she'd dragged her own ghost inside with her – a ghost which she'd finally put to rest.

As she slowly rose to her feet, she considered how this house had brought peace of mind and acceptance rather than evil and death since it had allowed her to come to terms with her mother's tragic death.

Lucy turned around to leave. Her exit was brought to a dead stop by her mother grabbing her by the throat and pinning her against the door.

"You always were a foolish little girl, honey," her mother hissed at her.

As Lucy felt the claws of her mother's hand ripping into her chest, she had to agree.

Only a fool would come into this house.

* * *

**Me: There it's finally done!**

**Lucy: …..**

**Me: Oh yea, um…..**

**Lucy: I hate this you need to delete it**

**Me: How come?**

**Lucy: My mother's not crazy**

**Me: Just relax it's a fanfiction**

**Lucy: No**

**Me: Please *puppy dog eyes***

**Lucy: *sighs* Fine**

**Me: yay!, now I'll see you guys next time on my other fanfiction, My Perfect Fairytale. Lucy, maybe you should make an appearance too, and bring Natsu!**

**Lucy: Natsu? Ok bye-bye fanfiction readers!**


End file.
